I thought about it. ‘A little bit.’
‘Good!’
‘Will you put the swimming hat on again though?’
‘I knew it. Latex—works every time with the laydeez.’
‘This explains a lot to me about why you’re single.’
‘Ha ha. So listen, will you think about the stand-up comedy? It must be on the list for a reason, and it’s a good place to start.’
I heard myself say, ‘I’ll do it if you do.’
‘Now, I’m recently single, so if you have any nice available friends … or brothers … or dads … granddads … I’m not too fussy. Seen all that stuff about Fifty Shades of Grey, eh? The trouble is, they don’t make erotica for bookish ladies like me. My idea fantasy would be this—I’m a librarian. A man comes in wearing braces and glasses. Hey, got a copy of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel? Which version? The one her damn husband didn’t butcher, of course. Then we roll around in the stacks discussing gender politics.’
I crossed all that out with a big X and wrote a little note to myself: THIS IS RUBBISH.
‘So, I’m recently single and I listen to a lot of Sad, I mean, Magic FM. You know in the song “Nothing Compares 2 U”? How great is Sinead O’Connor’s doctor, advising her to have fun no matter what she does? All mine ever says is, “Really, are you sure it’s just two to three units a week?” and “Come back in a week if it’s still itching.” Although I can’t help wondering if in her emotional state Sinead is confusing “doctor” with “low-rate pimp”.’ That was better. Maybe I could do a whole riff on how when you have a break-up you spend all your time listening to maudlin pop songs, and overanalysing the lyrics of them.
I think it was the promise of Patrick on stage that had made me say yes to the comedy. His uptight English manner making jokes and performing—I couldn’t picture it. So now I was neurotically writing down ‘comedy’. What was funny? I was getting divorced and effectively homeless and had no money—hilarious stuff! I’d have my own sitcom by the weekend.
Things that suck about divorce, number one hundred and forty-eight: there’s no one who knows you better than you know yourself, to tell you when, actually, you really can’t do something and should just stay at home and watch TV.
Patrick, with his annoying Type A personality, had already booked us into a weekend course by tapping two buttons on his iPad. He was as bad as Cynthia for actually making things happen. By lunchtime, all I had was a page of crossed-out phrases like ‘loose women—tight women, more like’ and stupid lists like ‘things you leave behind when you move out of your house after divorce (KT Tunstall CD, lemon juicer)’. I decided to go downstairs for lunch. All my cartoon work was sitting undone, it was past Doctors time and I hadn’t even started on any of the moving admin I still had to do (change address, file for divorce, buy laundry basket).
Patrick was at the kitchen table, his drawing board sitting unused beside him. He’d decided to ‘work from home’ that day—i.e. sit about obsessing about jokes. He was staring at a piece of paper and muttering to himself. I recognised a fellow comedy casualty. ‘Struggling?’
‘Is it just me, or is nothing funny any more? Literally nothing?’
‘I doubt I would even laugh at a video of a cat running into a wall right now. That’s how bad things are.’
‘Why are we doing this, Rachel?’
I spooned Darjeeling into the tea infuser. ‘Because if you can’t go back, you have to go forward.’
He seemed to find this cheering. ‘That’s good. And I can’t go back, can I? Neither can you. But do we actually have to go so far forward? I mean, we’ll be on stage. The last time I did that I was nineteen and rocking out with my band, The Corduroy Underground, at my university summer ball. We were awful.’
‘What did you play?’
‘Bass. I sang too. It was sort of my band.’
‘Do you play now?’
‘Oh, no. Michelle made me put the guitars in the attic. They were cluttering up the place, she said, and Alex might fall over them.’
I thought about this as my tea brewed—I believe that was why it was invented, in fact. To let your thoughts infuse slowly as the leaves did. ‘Patrick? Have you thought any more about doing your own list? They say divorce is the time to do things—you know, experiment. Take back all the parts of yourself you put away for the person you were with.’ As I said it, I imagined bits of him locked in an attic—music, a sense of fun maybe, his laugh, which I hadn’t heard since I moved in. ‘So what would be on yours? You said extreme sports before.’
‘Oh, I don’t have time for a list.’
‘You’ve got time to watch all five series of Breaking Bad,’ I pointed out.
‘Hmm. You have a point.’
‘Go on, write it down. It’ll free you for comedy at least. Get the brain moving, that sort of thing. Tell me one thing you wish you’d done in the past five years.’
‘Get drunk,’ he said right away. ‘That sounds bad, I know. I just used to really enjoy going to the pub, chatting about nothing, getting into stupid rows about who was the best Batman, that sort of thing. Since Alex I’ve been too scared, in case he needs me.’
‘Couldn’t someone babysit?’
‘I don’t know who I’d trust.’ I wondered why he was so reluctant to leave Alex with anyone—had he and Michelle just been really overprotective? ‘I’ll think of a way, I promise. No divorced person should have to do it without the aid of alcohol.’
‘Glad to have you in my corner.’
‘What else?’
‘Skydiving is a definite. I’ve always wanted to try it.’
‘OK. We have getting drunk and skydiving. Maybe not at the same time. More?’
He was on a roll now. ‘I’d like to go to a festival. Michelle never would—she hates camping, and she’s not much of a music fan.’
‘A festival is on my list, so you can’t have it, but you could certainly go. Alex could go to that,’ I said, scribbling it down.
‘Hmm, yes, he probably could. Max too.’ I was getting another mental image—the little dog at Glastonbury, watching a field full of posh hippies dance about with no clothes on.
Patrick’s suggestions were coming fast now. He also wanted to buy a really nice car, take Alex overseas for the first time, learn to fillet fish—I know, of all the things you can do in the world he wanted to handle fish innards; I guess the gut wants what the gut wants—take up climbing and enter Max in a dog show. These were getting more outlandish now. I could more easily imagine Max skydiving than obeying dog commands.
‘You should put that you want to play in a band again,’ I said. ‘That was the first thing you mentioned, remember?’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I’ve sort of lost touch with most of my mates. Been so busy with work and Alex, you know.’
‘True friends don’t mind if you don’t see them for a while.’
‘I’d be rubbish now. I haven’t played in years.’
‘You think I was any good at dancing? The idea is to be slightly terrified at all times.’ I rapped the list with my knuckles. ‘If I can offer my opinion as a professional listmaker, these are too safe.’